Sichuanese dialects

Sichuanese is mainly spoken in and around the Sichuan Basin, which includes almost all of Sichuan Province and Chongqing Municipality except for some Tibetan and Yi inhabited areas. It is also spoken in the border regions of Sichuan's neighboring provinces: northern Yunnan and Guizhou, southern Shaanxi and western Hubei. However, it is possible to divide Sichuanese into four sub-dialects according to the preservation or distribution of the Middle Chinese checked tone: the Minjiang dialect (), which preserves the checked tone; the Chengdu-Chongqing dialect (), in which the checked tone has merged into the light level tone; the Renshou-Fushun dialect (), which merges the checked tone into the departing tone; and the Ya'an–Shimian dialect (), in which the checked tone is merged into the dark level tone. The Minjiang, Ya'an–Shimian and Renshou–Fushun dialects are spoken mainly in South and West Sichuan, regions in which the inhabitants have significantly more indigenous Sichuanese descent than those of North and East Sichuan. Thus, these dialects are often referred as Old Sichuanese, as the preserve many characteristics of Bashu, the extinct language formerly spoken by the first Sichuanese Han Chinese people. The Chengdu-Chongqing dialect, named after the two largest cities in greater Sichuan, are spoken in a contiguous area mainly in North and East Sichuan. It is often referred as New Sichuanese because it exhibits fewer characteristics of the Bashu language. ==History==

Like many of the southern provinces in China, Sichuan was fully sinicized by the end of the Tang dynasty. The modern variety of Chinese spoken in the region formed relatively recently. In the thirteenth century, the population of Sichuan dropped precipitously, suspected to be due in part to a series of plagues and Mongol invasions. The population did not recover until it was replenished by subsequent migrations from Hubei, as well as Xiang, Gan and Hakka-speakers in the following centuries. These varieties largely supplanted the earlier varieties of Chinese in Sichuan, known as Ba–Shu Chinese or Old Sichuanese. Like Min Chinese, Ba-Shu Chinese was different from the Middle Chinese of the Sui, Tang and Song dynasties, but instead a divergent dialect group independently descended from the Old Chinese of the Han dynasty, which formed a substratum that influenced the formation of the modern dialect group and helps to explain the distinctiveness of Modern Sichuanese within the Mandarin dialect continuum. ==Phonology==

Tones There are five phonemic tones in Sichuanese: dark level tone, light level tone, rising tone, departing tone and entering tone (or checked tone). In some regions the checked tone of Sichuanese has been merged into another tone, which is very different from standard Mandarin, whose checked tone has been merged irregularly into the other four tones. According to Phonology of Sichuan dialect (), among all the 150 Sichuanese-speaking cities and counties, 48 keep the checked tone while the other 102 have only four tones. Particularly, in some sub-dialects of the Minjiang dialect (such as the Yingjing dialect), the departing tone has developed into two different tones: a colloquial tone (which is similar to the second tone as a characteristic of Ba-Shu: ) and a literary tone (which is the same as the Chengdu dialect). The tone contours of the Sichuanese dialects are highly and quite different from those of Beijing Mandarin. In Sichuanese, the first tone (dark level tone) is a high level tone (like Beijing), the second tone (light level tone) is a low falling tone (the mirror image of Beijing), the third tone (rising tone) is a high falling tone and the fourth tone (departing tone) is a low or mid rising tone (interchanged compared to Beijing) and the fifth tone (entering tone) is mid or high if it's not merged, as shown in the chart below. The following table shows the tense vowels of Minjiang dialect's three sub-dialects, spoken in Luzhou, Qionglai and Leshan, and a comparison with other Sichuanese dialects is also presented. Literary and colloquial readings The existence of literary and colloquial readings (), is a notable feature in Sichuanese and some other Sinitic varieties, such as Cantonese or Hokkien. In Sichuanese, colloquial readings tend to resemble Ba-Shu Chinese (Old Sichuanese) or Southern Old Mandarin, while literary readings tend to resemble modern standard Mandarin. For example, in the Yaoling dialect (), the colloquial reading of "" (means "things") is , which is very similar to its pronunciation of Ba-Shu Chinese in the Song dynasty (960–1279). Meanwhile, its literary reading, , is relatively similar to the standard Mandarin pronunciation . The table below shows some examples of Chinese characters with both literary and colloquial readings in Sichuanese. ==Vocabulary==

Only 47.8% of Sichuanese vocabulary is in common with the Beijing dialect on which Standard Chinese is based; indeed Sichuanese shares more vocabulary with the Xiang and Gan varieties of Chinese, even though Sichuanese is usually classified as a dialect of Mandarin. "" (xiong2qi3) (meaning "to cheer someone on") is a typical example of a novel Sichuanese word, equivalent to "" () in standard Mandarin. "耙耳朵" (Pá ěr duo) is a word exclusive to Sichuanese, which means "henpecked husbands". A standard Mandarin equivalent of "" is "" (qī guǎn yán). The prototype of "" comes from a kind of bicycle with "ears" in Chengdu, which was first invented by men in Chengdu in order to make their wives sit more comfortably. There are still a few such bikes on streets of Chengdu. Relation with other Chinese languages The Chengdu dialect is usually taken as a representative of Sichuanese. For example, in both Sichuanese and Xiang the verb "to squat" is "" (gu1) but "" (dūn) in standard Mandarin, the noun "kitchen" is "" (zao4vu2) but "" (chúfáng) in standard, and the adjective "thick" is "" (ȵian4) but "" (nóng) in standard. Furthermore, the Sichuanese vocabulary also contains words from Old Xiang and Middle Xiang, such as "" (sloppy), "" (old) and "" (son). ==Status==

Though Sichuanese is not as endangered as some other languages of China, the prevalence of Sichuanese has dramatically lessened as the popularity of Mandarin Chinese has risen. Government policy limits the use of Sichuanese in broadcasting, television and many public places. Furthermore, the use of Sichuanese as a teaching medium is not permitted in the curriculum, which has resulted in a reduction of fluency among young people in Sichuanese-speaking areas since the 1980s and 1990s. The Sichuanese spoken by them is greatly influenced by the national language. The decline of Sichuanese threatens to severely impact Ba-Shu culture, rooted in the Sichuanese dialect, particularly traditional Shu arts such as Sichuan opera, which risk severe decline or even extinction. China enacted laws in 2000 mandating the use of Mandarin. Provinces, including Sichuan, established language committees to advise, monitor, and enforce Mandarin usage. The mandate inevitably caused massive decline in audience members and the performance of traditional Ba-shu folk art. ==See also==